The world of Lunar seems to be eternally shrinking. The game world of Lunar: The Silver Star and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue were massive worlds. The distances on the overworld were expansive. You would need to cover great distances in getting to where you needed to be, just to then enter huge dungeons. With the remakes, even being spread across multiple discs, they needed to scale down the size of the worlds, because of all the full motion video. They also needed to lower the sound quality, but that's another issue entirely. They kept the locations and the terrain and the landmarks the same, but they reduced the overall size of the overworld to one-tenth of its original size. If you'd never had played the SEGA CD originals, you'd likely never even notice the smaller overworld size as the world still seems large. Only those who have played the original would be able to notice. For the NDS Lunar: Dragon Song, Game Arts and JAM have gone one step further. They've removed the overworld exploration entirely. The overworld is now a mere map with selectable hotspots. In all versions of Lunar before Dragon Song, there were huge villages and cities to explore. Here again, they've employed the map and hotspot system. You'll enter the town and up comes a map with all the possible locations. You'll move the cursor around and select where you want to go. Like Gad's Express, or Moses' House, Goddess Fountain, or the Armor, Weapon, and Item Shops. Inside each location is the traditional 16-bit RPG building interior that you can walk around in complete with the NPC sprites going about their lives. Once you're done with the business in town, you'll select the hotspot for exiting the town and find yourself on the world map. You can't just go from one corner of the map to the other corner in one swift choice. You have to connect the dots, so to speak. You'll have one or two options for where to go from your current location. If one of them is a dungeon, like Thieves Forest, then you'll have to make your way through that dungeon again to get to the other side and come out on the world map with new choices. The dungeons are the same as they've ever been in the Lunar games. Large, multi-sectioned areas with nooks and crannies to explore with plenty of out of the way treasure chests to be had. Since the game was designed for a portable system, it makes sense that the developers would design a game engine to fit playing on the go. I personally don't think they needed to do that with the save anywhere save system they have in the game. It would allow for the traditionally large Lunar overworld, and the large towns, with many hidden areas and secrets. They also have the other aspect of portable RPGs covered. They have a system in place to where with the push a button you're instantly reminded of your current objective in both what you need to be doing, and where you need to be. With both of those in place, there isn't any real reason to skimp on the overworld and towns. Would I prefer the original games' style? The answer is obviously yes. But I can live with the system as is. It's not truly a negative. It's functional and well done. It just gives a slight impression of cutting corners...
The one place they've never cut corners in the previous Lunar games is in the story and characterization. That'll be covered next time. I'm currently twenty hours in, and the story has kicked in proper.
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